DECOLONIZING
DIALECTICS
GEORGE CICCARIELLO-MAHER
DE COLONIZING
DI A L E C T IC S
RADICAL AMÉRICAS
A series edited by Bruno Bosteels
and George Ciccariello-Maher
DECOLONIZING
DI A L EC T ICS
george cicc a r iello - m a her
Duke University Press
Durham and London
2017
© 2017 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞
Designed by Heather Hensley
Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Westchester Publishing Services
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ciccariello-Maher, George, author.
Title: Decolonizing dialectics / George Ciccariello-Maher.
Other titles: Radical Américas.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. |
Series: Radical Américas | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2016028024 (print)
lccn 2016029328 (ebook)
isbn 9780822362234 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822362432 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822373704 (e-book)
Subjects: lcsh: Dialectic. | Postcolonialism. | Critical theory.
Classification: lcc b809.7 .c54 2016 (print) | lcc b809.7 (ebook) |
ddc 190—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016028024
Cover art: H. L. Stephens, Blow for Blow (detail), ca. 1863;
reproduction number lc-uszc4-2523. Courtesy of the Library
of Congress.
G. W. F.
W. E. B.
C. L. R.
F. O. F.
H. C. F.
CON T E N T S
ix
1
23
Acknowledgments
RUPTURES
Chapter 1
JUMPSTARTING THE CLASS STRUG GLE
47
Chapter 2
TOWARD A NEW DIALECTICS OF RACE
75
Chapter 3
THE DECOLONIAL NATION IN MOTION
103
Chapter 4
LATIN AMERICAN DIALECTICS AND THE OTHER
123
Chapter 5
VENEZUELA’S COMBATIVE DIALECTICS
153
SPIRALS
171
Notes
Bibliography
Index
219
233
AC K N O WL E D G M E N T S
This book was conceived in Berkeley, written largely in Caracas, and completed in Philadelphia—it bears the marks of each within it. Forever ago,
it was not a book at all, but a dissertation, and before that a list of theoretical provocateurs. For helping guide and shape its metamorphosis, my
greatest debt goes to my dissertation committee: Wendy Brown, Mark
Bevir, Pheng Cheah, Kiren Chaudhry, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres.
Wendy guided and pressed me to overcome my own limitations and blind
spots, to think harder and to think better, and to prize commitment, all
with a firm generosity that I can only hope to emulate. I arrived a pretender
without much in the way of social graces, and she was kind even when I put
my foot in my mouth. No single individual has seen more of what follows
than she has, and even what she has not seen bears her indelible mark.
Few of us are so lucky.
When I asked Wendy whether my dissertation project was a good idea,
she didn’t hesitate for a second—was I really going to do anything else?
No, I wasn’t. When I decided to move to Caracas for no apparent reason,
and then to write a different book—We Created Chávez—when I should
have been writing my dissertation, no one objected to such apparent lunacy. Kiren even memorably suggested that it would be the perfect place to
get into just enough trouble; she was more than right, and I am more than
grateful. Mark instilled in me a no-nonsense historical sensibility that has
been consistently valuable. Pheng’s commentary always combined a lucid
rigor with an only occasionally daunting bluntness.
Nelson Maldonado-Torres welcomed me warmly into the fold of ethnic
studies: by introducing me to Fanon and Dussel, inviting my participation
in the Caribbean Philosophical Association and last-minute trips to Zapatista territory in the Selva Lacandona, he helped to set me down the path
I now tread. He brought me into a supportive community including Jorge
Gonzalez, Ramón Grosfoguel, Roberto D. Hernández, Richard Pithouse,
Aníbal Quijano, Neil Roberts, Daphne Taylor-García, and many others, not
to mention the inimitable Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis Gordon, and the
entire board of the Caribbean Philosophical Association—which remains
one of the most welcoming and supportive intellectual communities in existence. Nelson further encouraged me to translate Latin American theory,
a sometimes-thankless task but one without which this book would never
have been what it is. Enrique Dussel has been a disarmingly kind collaborator and supportive interlocutor along the way.
Wendy’s dissertation group provided essential feedback in the early
stages of this project, and was the perfect ratio of comradely and challenging: Diana Anders, Libby Anker, Ivan Ascher, Ali Bond, Mona Bower, Matt
Baxter, Yasmeen Daifallah, Jennifer Denbow, Tim Fisken, Jack Jackson,
Asaf Kedar, Sarah Kendall, Annika Thiem, Zhivka Valiavicharska, Yves
Winter, and others I have inevitably forgotten. Senior cadres—particularly
Jimmy Casas Klausen, Robyn Marasco, and Sharon Stanley—led us by example, as they continue to lead.
While at Berkeley, I taught some of these thinkers alongside Jeffrey Paris
in the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison. To our students, whose insatiable taste for the concrete did not undermine the pleasure they took in abstraction: seeing some of you escape the gulag is more
than I could possibly ask for.
As I was finishing my time at Berkeley, the upsurge came—and it is this
same upsurge that we are still living today. The murder of Oscar Grant on
New Year’s Day 2009 was one of many, but one that thankfully came to
matter more than most. From the flames of Oakland came the occupations
at Berkeley, from which Occupy was born as a strange progeny. I treasure
my friends and comrades from that period, in particular Nima Bassiri, Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover, Robeson Taj Frazier, Satyel Larson, and Annie
McClanahan, not to mention the original troublemakers at Reclamations
journal: Chris Chen and Zhivka Valiavicharska. My appreciation as well to
the University of California Police Department for its sheer incompetence,
for never discovering my identity despite the fact that I worked right next
door every day.
x
Acknowl edgments
This book is inextricable from the context of Venezuela, where I moved
in 2006 to begin teaching and learning, learning by teaching, struggling
and being struggled with by student-militants at the Venezuelan School of
Planning. In many senses, Decolonizing Dialectics is a theoretical companion
piece to We Created Chávez, since I read and thought with these thinkers
amid the combative heat of the Venezuelan crucible. It should be said, however, that from Venezuela I have taken far more than I have given, from
those revolutionary movements that have provided me not only inspiration but also the concrete foundation required for any thought to become
real. Today, Venezuelans continue to teach what it means to not back down,
turning defeat into new victories, one step back into two steps forward.
My colleagues at Drexel have been sympathetic and supportive, and the
university has been both understanding and patient, despite the hate mail
it has brought. Julie Mostov in particular has been unfailingly kind. At the
University of Pennsylvania, Tulia Falleti, Jeff Green, Andy Lamas, Anne
Norton, Rogers Smith, and Bot Vitalis have been encouraging, as have many
UPenn graduate students, Osman Balkan in particular. I am more than
grateful for the recent support that many have shown for this project: particularly Amy Allen, Linda Martín Alcoff, and Charles Mills, not to mention
my theory comrades of various shades of red: Paul Apostolidis, Anita
Chari, Glen Coulthard, Andrew Dilts, Jeanne Morefield, Robert Nichols,
Corey Robin, Jakeet Singh, and Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo.
The arguments that make up this book have been tested and enunciated, in written form but just as often in the streets. In their clearer expressions, they have been presented at apsa, wpsa, apa, apt, and the
cpa; Rethinking Marxism; the Sciences Po; the University of Pennsylvania
Political Theory Workshop; Ed Emery’s autonomist conference at Cambridge some years back; the Georgetown University Institute for Global History; the International Association for Philosophy and Literature; and the
International Congress of Americanists. Early versions of some arguments
have appeared in The Commoner, Contemporary Political Theory, Human Architecture, Listening, and Theory & Event. The last of these warrants special
comment, since past and current editors of Theory & Event—Jodi Dean,
Davide Panagia, and James Martel, in particular—welcomed me immediately and warmly as a combative fellow traveler.
Courtney Berger at Duke University Press has been unnecessarily supportive of this project from the outset. I thank her for reminding me, gently
but firmly, that Duke is where this book belongs—as usual, she was right.
Moreover, both she and Gisela Fosado embraced my early suggestion for
Acknowl edgments
xi
a book series geared toward our new hemispheric reality, and the series
that this volume inaugurates—Radical Américas—is the result. My appreciation to comrade Bruno Bosteels for being willing to co-navigate these
waters with me in the hopes of turning the tide. The entire Duke team
has been a pleasure to work with, joke with, and tweet with throughout
the years—Laura Sell in par ticular; I look forward to more of the same.
Anonymous reviews from two different presses improved the manuscript
enormously, and Andrew Dilts and Jason E. Smith both read closely and
gave thoughtful feedback. Participants in the Tri-College Political Theory
Workshop—Susan Liebell, Joel Schlosser, Molly Farneth, Craig Borowiak,
Jill Stauffer, Osman Balkan, Gabe Salgado, Zach Smith, Tom Donahue,
and Paulina Ochoa Espejo—provided invaluable comments and advice on
the penultimate draft of the introduction.
As a dissertation, this project was not about dialectics in name, but soon
enough—in good dialectical fashion—its content outstripped its form
through the tight spiral of theory-practice-theory. In the 1970s, the Sojourner Truth Organization (sto) began to train its militants in dialectics,
through an intensive curriculum entitled, with a hubris that only Lenin
could have inspired, How to Think. As a member of Bring the Ruckus—an
organizational heir to sto—we continued to study and teach dialectics according to their model, based on readings from Hegel, Marx, Engels, Lenin,
Luxemburg, C. L. R. James, and W. E. B. Du Bois, alongside those readings
that grounded our political tradition in the centrality of white supremacy
in the United States. In Bring the Ruckus, we practiced a self-consciously
combative dialectics that we often described as drawing hard lines. The
painful discovery that not everyone draws those lines in the same place
doomed us, but not without strengthening the resolve of those who still
walk the crookedly dialectical path. To comrades past and present, this
book is an imperfect attempt to put what we have been doing into words.
One comrade, Taryn Jordan, knows better than any other the pain of
combat, but also that rage—while explosive—is the best fuel. Thanks to
my Philly comrades for their patience above all else, and for never backing
down. In 2015 Philadelphia—as in 2009 Oakland—a small group of those
that Huey Newton would call “the implacables” helped to tip the balance
and press an entire city in new and unforeseen directions. Joel Olson, political theorist and founding member of Bring the Ruckus, left us nearly
five years ago. A walking, talking double helix of militant theory and practice, Joel was completing a book on fanaticism when he died. At our best,
all we can hope is to be half as fanatical as he was. I count among my most
xii Acknowl edgments
treasured friends and comrades those who continue to build upon his legacy, including Alberto Toscano, Jord/ana Rosenberg, and the decolonial
fanatics coalescing around Abolition journal, for which Eli Meyerhoff ’s efforts have been heroic and indispensable.
I learned combat young and of all those who have had my back in a fight,
my parents were the first and the most important. My best memories are
of them fighting for their children and themselves; my worst memories
are of the pain that left them no choice but to do so. They showed by example why it’s important to struggle, and I’m sure they have occasionally
regretted just how well the lesson stuck. My gratitude to the Ciccariello
family for lending me their name—I’ll give it back, I promise. My deepest thanks and mustache emojis to Andrew Dilts and John Drabinski—
confidants and sounding boards—and what the hell, to Sheela Cheong
and Rich Porter too, whoever you are. Sina Kramer has been generous and
patient in pressing me to think Hegel better, and Marisa Parham coached
me best when I needed it. As always, Alicia, Jeff, and Lyla Bell are a refuge.
Finally there is Oakley Francisco, who if he wants—and I suspect he
will—may one day suffer the painful dialectics of parenthood. There is nothing worse than struggling against pristine young beings, setting before them
the barriers they must overcome if they are ever to learn for themselves. In
every overcoming we take one step closer to self-consciousness, and nothing
is more selfish than robbing them of that opportunity. My deepest gratitude
to Abbey Irene for her patience with him and with me, crying, laughing, or
more often laugh-crying, while we shake our heads to the same question as
always: “what even is this child?”
Frantz Fanon once blamed the lateness of a book on his boiling blood.
But having found in him a kindred spirit like no other, I don’t believe
that—in his brief life—his blood ever truly stopped boiling. Wary of zealotry, Fanon was in fact the best kind of zealot. In any case, I have no such
excuse. This book could have been written before, and the temperature has
not dropped but only risen. I can only hope that in this world, which every
day proves itself unworthy of existence, this book may be useful, if only
for the sharpening of weapons.
Acknowl edgments
xiii
RU P T U R E S
ours is a newly dialectical age, the much-touted teleological resolution of the “end of history” having collapsed like the myth that it always
was into fragmentation, division, and dynamic oppositions, new struggles erupting over old questions. For too long, however, dialectics has not
served to denote such moments of combative division that give its name,
but instead the opposite: a harmonious closure often announced but
rarely experienced. For this, Hegel bears as much responsibility as anyone: driven by a profound anxiety toward rupture and “intense longing”
for unity, Hegel’s dialectical vision would enable conservative resolutions
even as it opened radical possibilities.1
It is perhaps little surprise, then, that the most famous recent attempt
to recruit Hegel for the task of declaring history over—Francis Fukuyama’s
The End of History—took much the same form as Hegel’s own preemptive
dialectical closure nearly two centuries prior, albeit in a more transparently
conservative way. Blind to the internal tensions of globalizing capital, Fukuyama even more than Hegel fell back on a faith in the impossible: the
resolution of the utterly contradictory, the reconciliation of humanity with
its opposite, through the same vehicle: civil society.2 Today, more than two
decades after the banner of civil society was hoisted to topple the Soviet
Union and usher in a temporarily unipolar neoliberal world, that banner
now dangles in tatters, its internal tensions bared and its complicities
with power ever more apparent—the vehicle of choice for removing intransigent regimes from Yugoslavia to Haiti, Ukraine, and Venezuela.3
By contrast, new struggles are emerging, new ruptures throwing forth
new and renewed identities that deepen contradictions and press toward
different possible futures. I do not refer to what for years was offered to
disprove liberal optimism—namely, the resurgence of political Islam—
although this too is a clear enough indication that history has yet to reach
its terminus. I refer instead primarily to those struggles that have surged
forth in opposition to the neoliberal onslaught and which pose the possibility of a postneoliberal world: the Latin American “pink tide” (especially
in its darker red variants), a veritable global wave of riots and rebellions
returning like the repressed to the heart of the Old World (Paris, London),
and more recently the broad upsurge comprising the Arab Spring, the
Spanish indignados, and the Occupy Movement. New identities, new struggles, and new forms of sociability, the novelty of each never expressed in
absolute terms, but instead as an occasionally painful process of strategic
and tactical refinement whose defeats and reversals are as pronounced as
its victories and advances.
Not surprisingly, this newly combative moment has been accompanied
by and intertwined as both cause and effect with a rebirth of dialectical
thought. Whether in recent attempts to rethink the Hegelian legacy, to
renovate the Marxist and communist tradition, or to mobilize against the
current political and economic crises racking the globe, the question of
dialectics—the dynamic movement of conflictive oppositions—is once
again firmly on the table.4 In this process, the dialectical questions par
excellence—what to preserve and what to discard, how to move forward
without reproducing the errors of the past—are re-posed with heightened urgency. But in the context of struggles that are powerfully global,
at the intersection of the inverse but complicit dynamics of outsourcing
and exodus-migration, white supremacist containment and suburban rebellion, we cannot escape the historically fraught relationship between
dialectics and decolonization, one long characterized by mutual suspicion.
On the one hand, while Hegel and especially Karl Marx have long served
as go-to sources for struggles emerging from the global periphery, these
same authors have been viewed with skepticism due to their shared Eurocentrism and the linear, progressive, determinist, and teleological elements
of their approaches. As a result, most postcolonial theory has “eluded engagement with . . . the reworking of dialectical thinking.”5 Viewed from
the opposite direction, however, this postcolonial suspicion is not without reason, since despite the undeniable resources that Hegel and Marx
furnished for later decolonial thought, many contemporary neodialec2 Ruptures
ticians have done little to alleviate the concerns of their would-be decolonial allies. Reacting to poststructuralist and postcolonial critiques of
the universal, thinkers from Slavoj Žižek to Alain Badiou have effectively
bent the stick in the opposite direction, occasionally to a troubling degree.
Where Badiou has assailed an “ethics of difference” that is complicit with
capitalist multiculturalism, his alternative is the unalloyed universalism
of a “generic humanity” that is fundamentally “indifferent to differences.”6
Žižek, with a characteristic zeal for the provocative, has gone even further
in urging the Left to openly embrace Eurocentrism.7 But as a boomerang
effect of the poststructural politics of difference, much is missed in this
precipitous return swing toward the universal.
Troubling Unity
Despite the palpable divisions increasingly embraced in theory and incarnated in practice, political logics of the present remain curiously trained
on unity. In a maneuver that Michel Foucault describes as recentering and
even recolonization, unitary logics stalk political oppositions, seeking to
deactivate unruly movements in the name of power and sovereignty. Political leaders from Right to Left, Republicans and Democrats alike, maneuver and jockey less over substantive differences than over who can claim
the mantle of speaking for everyone and whose unity is therefore preferable. Thus we unify against our enemies under Barack Obama as we did
under George W. Bush, with the sole proviso that Afghanistan is a “good
war” while Iraq was a “bad war,” a merely qualitative metric for determining
who “our” absolute enemy is.
So too in domestic affairs, where the question is not “what price unity?”
but instead, “who is the us that is unified?” Obama’s famous 2008 “race
speech” was accordingly titled “A More Perfect Union,” but four years later
his cynical pretensions shone through when he admitted that “the nature of
this office is also to tell a story that gives them a sense of unity and purpose
and optimism.” Here Hegelian themes are clearly on display: totality (we are
unified), teleology (we have a purpose), and the promise of progress (we
are optimistic). The inescapability of this logic of unity was clear as day just
two months later when Mitt Romney violated this cardinal rule in a leaked
video, scornfully dismissing the laziness of the 47 percent. Having accidentally proven his unsuitability for “the nature of this office,” Romney paid the
price for speaking the inverted truth of a class warfare he rejected in public.
The differences between the two candidates would prove more rhetorical than substantive as a result: Obama’s watered-down immigration
Ruptures
3
reform is a drop in the bucket compared with record deportations; in
terms of human rights abuses abroad, one unnamed government official
spoke of “no change at all . . . an almost seamless transition from Bush to
Obama”;8 Obama’s much-touted Affordable Care Act has left the private
insurance sector firmly in the driver’s seat; and the long-promised integration of Black Americans into this unified nation has been little more than
window dressing. Rather than the crowning resolution of struggles past,
Obama’s election has instead represented, as Glen Ford presciently predicted, “the antithesis of Black Power”—a dialectical identity if ever there
was one—its deactivation and incorporation into the status quo ante.9
If we had any reason to doubt this diagnosis in an age of mass incarceration and resurgent white fascism, then the names turned hashtags Oscar
Grant, Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride, Tamir Rice, CeCe McDonald,
Sandra Bland, and Mike Brown—among thousands of others—serve as a
painful reminder. The nation remains fundamentally unchanged, albeit
adorned with fewer Confederate flags. But even the most cynical campaign
rhetoric and even the emptiest promises can produce social blowback: if
theorists of revolutionary change have long emphasized how rising and
frustrated expectations can spark social upheaval, we find this confirmed
in the militant resistance that broke out at the dawn of the age of Obama
and has only escalated in the falling dusk of his promised hope and change,
in those local names turned national symbols: Ferguson and Baltimore. And
lest we dismiss the unitary rhetoric of sovereignty as simply a ruse, reducing it to the disingenuousness of political power, such logics permeate far more deeply, cutting into and across oppositional movements and
discourses themselves, disarming movements from within and preparing
them for reincorporation into the governing apparatus.
Here, the Occupy Movement provides a dire warning. While Occupy
gained initial traction as a clarion call for social equality by re-posing class
conflict in the now-famous ratio of the wealthiest 1 percent against the remaining 99 percent, swirling immediately in and around the occupied camps
was the sharp interrogation of this ratio, not from advocates of unity, but
from those posing division in different terms. Those criticizing the slogan
of the 99 percent from a class perspective rightly worried that this ratio displaced hostility from capitalist exploiters to the recently popularized category of the “super-rich,” usually associated with high finance. Inversely,
others argued that there was little practical use for a category in which one
could still earn over $300,000 annually and technically be a member of the
“99 percent”: in this view, demonizing the super-rich simply acquitted the
4 Ruptures
just plain rich of their exploitative role. Others shunned a strictly economic
approach entirely, insisting that the fault lines racking U.S. society have
more to do with anti-Black racism, colonization (whose relation to calls
to “occupy” is tense at best), or gender. Ultimately, the most militant of
occupations—in Oakland, California—divided into two wings known as “Occupy Oakland” and “Decolonize Oakland,” although the question of whether
this particular division of one into two was a dialectical one, remains open.10
Those who defended the idea of the 99 percent, and especially those
who enforced it in practice in the Occupy encampments, testified to both
the lure of unity and its dangers. For many, the strength of the slogan of the
99 percent was its inclusivity, the laudable aspiration to gather rather than
disperse our forces. But by asymptotically approaching the inclusion of
everyone, we run the risk of sliding into far more treacherous territory,
moving from rupture, division, and opposition toward the aspirational
recasting of a near-total unity. If anything, this is the most ideological gesture of all, one that seeks to reconcile rupture with its opposite, taking
refuge in the comforting idea that we are all in this together rather than
engaging in risky solidarity against. While dangerous in its own right, this
slide toward unitary logic also enacted- while- concealing concrete exclusions as well: critics were tarred as “divisive,” as a mortal threat to the unity
of the 99 percent, and this label was reserved especially for those who
sought to establish people of color or women’s caucuses within the camps.
In banishing difference, this homogeneous universalism jealously reproduced the unity it had once claimed to oppose, and demands for internal unity proved complicit with the even more dangerous openness that
some camps demonstrated toward the power structure itself: welcoming
local mayors and police into the warm embrace of the 99 percent all the
while silencing internal dissidents. In many places, Occupy thereby became
a safe space for those already safe, refusing to even exclude white supremacists, anti-immigrant activists, and Ron Paul supporters, while embattled
radicals drifted away. It was only a matter of time before Occupy candidates
began to make electoral bids, and large sectors of the movement were reincorporated into the same power structure it had sought to oppose. As I
write this, moreover, it is clear that such threats were not limited to Occupy: observe the ease with which political opportunists and foundation
funders are currently working to recolonize the oppositional energy of the
Black Lives Matter movement by exploiting the political naiveté of some
of its leaders—we can only hope that the explosiveness of Ferguson and
Baltimore will not be bought off so cheaply.
Ruptures
5
Beyond revealing the seductions of unity, such dynamics point toward
the contested nature of the identities in question and tenacious debates
about the relationship between race, class, nation, and gender.11 How to
negotiate these dynamics, these microdialectics that cut into and across
oppositional movements themselves, while always keeping a wary eye
toward that dangerous lure that Cristina Beltrán calls “the trouble with
unity”?12 Whether in the theoretical chasm between Žižek’s universalism
and postcolonial theory or the on-the-ground clash between “Decolonize”
and “Occupy,” I argue that much is neglected in between. It is this vast and
generative space—one constituted by the unavoidable judgment of where
and when to draw hard lines, divide unities, and press oppositions—that I
hope to probe in this book, with the following questions in mind.
First, against those postcolonial thinkers who discard dialectics out of
hand, is it possible to subject the dialectical tradition to its own decolonizing Aufhebung, transcending its limitations by preserving what is useful
and shedding what is not? Second, and inversely, is there a dialectical understanding capable of accommodating the continuing project of decolonization, and the questions of race and nation that this process inevitably
confronts, or is the historical baggage of dialectical thought simply too
heavy to be worth the trouble? My response to both lies in the affirmative:
just as any attempt to systematically grasp the conflicts and identities that
structure our world requires that we rupture the boundaries of European
thought, we cannot grasp the parameters of decolonization as a profound
and ongoing process without recourse to some modified understanding of
that dynamic and combative motion that many give the name “dialectics.”
Decolonizing Dialectics
In this book, I approach the task of decolonizing dialectics by excavating a
largely subterranean current of thought, what I call a counterdiscourse, that
I argue constitutes a radicalization of the dialectical tradition while also
opening outward toward its decolonization. This is a dialectical counterdiscourse that, by foregrounding rupture and shunning the lure of unity,
makes its home in the center of the dialectic and revels in the spirit of
combat, the indeterminacies of political identities slamming against one
another, transforming themselves and their worlds unpredictably in the
process. This is a dialectical counterdiscourse that, by grasping the momentary hardening of group identities, grants weight to a separatist moment
in dialectics—at the expense of premature reconciliation—but does so
without succumbing to a hermetically essentialist separatism, be it of class,
6 Ruptures
race, nation, or otherwise. Identities are forged in struggle, and there too
are they reforged. This is a dialectical counterdiscourse that, as a result,
tosses off many of the shackles of a conservative dialectical tradition that
traffics under the phrase, only dubiously attributable to Hegel: “the real is
rational.”13 In confronting the antidialectical immobility of false universals
that portray the present as complete, the thinkers considered here resist all
teleology, determinism, linearity, refuse all comforting promises of inherent progress, and defer all premature declarations that history has indeed
reached its conclusion. Their horizon remains a horizon.14
I begin with the turn-of-the-century French syndicalist Georges Sorel to
distill the basic contours of a radicalized dialectic of European class struggle. Confronting the false promise of social unity that had deactivated
the class struggle, Sorel concluded that working-class conditions (class-initself) were no guarantee of an oppositional working-class identity (classfor-itself) and that the latter must be actively constructed and subjectively
projected in an openly combative struggle. In part through Sorel’s peculiar
attentiveness to the importance of ideology—and thereby the centrality
of class identity—he is able to glimpse at a surprisingly early moment the
contours of a broad Marxist dialectics of history stripped of all determinism and teleology, in which the identitarian intervention of the working
class serves as the fundamental but not invincible motor force. Despite,
or better put, as a result of his intransigent class-centrism—one that foregrounds ideology, identity, and active intervention— Sorel’s immanent
critique of European Marxism provides not the origin of decolonized
dialectics, but a radically combative baseline that is open to subsequent
decolonization
I then turn to the Martinican-born and French-trained psychiatrist
turned Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon, who serves as a bridge between Europe and the colonies and thereby from a European to a more
openly decolonial dialectics. Not unaware of Sorel’s work, Fanon nevertheless took an ostensibly different approach, engaging race (rather than
class) in the European context and doing so through a critical engagement
with the Hegelian master-slave dialectic (rather than the Marxist dialectic of
class struggle). Surface differences conceal substantive similarities, however:
where Sorel saw a dialectic frozen by the ideology of unity, Fanon saw one
short-circuited by white supremacy, in which the basis for reciprocity—
which Hegel took for granted—did not yet exist. Like Sorel, he advocated
subjective, identitarian struggle to jumpstart dialectical motion, but by
injecting subontological racial difference into Hegel’s formulation, he also
Ruptures
7
crucially “decolonized” the master-slave dialectic itself. After shifting to
the revolutionary Algerian context, Fanon confronted a similar context, albeit one characterized not by frozen unity, but by the congealed opposition
that he famously diagnosed as Manichaean. In response, he would project
this radicalized dialectic onto the global scale, posing a broad opposition
between the decolonial nation as a complex, shifting, and dialectical entity and those (neo)colonial forces intent on freezing its motion both from
within and from without.
Finally, I turn to the exiled Argentine philosopher of liberation Enrique
Dussel Ambrosini, who poses what would appear to be a direct challenge
to both the coherence of this counterdiscourse and to the possibility of
a decolonized dialectics more generally. Influenced by Emmanuel Levinas’s
ethics of alterity, Dussel is sharply critical of dialectics and instead embraces
what he calls an analectics rooted in the embrace of the Other as exteriority. However, as I show, Dussel’s break with dialectics is far from complete,
and rather than refuting a decolonized dialectics, his insistence on incorporating the category of exteriority into a dialectics of national and popular
identity provides an essential ingredient for my own project that—through
a sort of productive parallax—is visible in Fanon’s work as well.
It is this dynamic fusion of internal oppositions and decolonial appeal
to excluded exteriorities that, I then argue, we see playing out in the combative dialectics and multiple subdialectics swirling around and coalescing in Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution.” In the last chapter, I test the
traction of this decolonized dialectical approach through a reading of the
dynamic movement of “the people” (el pueblo) in a moment still shaped
by the combative specter of the late president Hugo Chávez. While some
Eurocentric critics dismiss popular identity as inherently unitary and homogenizing, I show how its contextual function in Venezuela—and much
of Latin America—tends instead to be combative and divisive. The dynamic
movement of the Venezuelan people in recent years has done more than
simply draw together different sectors in struggle; it has marked for many
the overcoming of ontological exclusions discernible only through a decolonized dialectical lens, their entrance into being itself.
A word on terminology and categories: the thinkers that I draw together
here write in markedly different registers. Thus Sorel, a more unabashedly
political and practical thinker, speaks scornfully of unity and “social harmony.” Fanon, who oscillates between political and ontological registers,
takes aim instead at false universals, whether at the foundation of Hegel’s
own system or in the politics of formal emancipation. In Dussel, finally,
8 Ruptures
the philosophical register takes center stage with his frontal critique of
“totality,” which he nevertheless translates into the categories of colonization and exclusion. To smooth such terminological disjunctions, I use the
language of the authors themselves, while anchoring the discussion conceptually to Martin Jay’s typology of the category of totality: specifically,
the distinction between descriptive and normative totalities, as well as
the more powerful conceptions of expressive totality (history as the unified expression of a single principle) and longitudinal totality (a temporal
unity in which that singular history moves progressively forward).15
Why Dialectics?
Each of the thinkers considered here is a sharp critic of the dialectical
tradition in its different manifestations. Sorel goes so far as to denounce
dialectics as illusory, Fanon aims his sharpest theoretical barbs at Hegel’s
dialectic of recognition, and Dussel turns to exteriority against what he
reads—transposing concepts with geopolitics—as a sort of dialectical imperialism. Each rejects elements so common to dialectical thinking as to be
considered by some its essential ingredients: teleology, determinism, progress, class-centrism, and two-sidedness, among others. If dialectics—or
better, “the dialectic”—is necessarily totalizing, deterministic, or teleological, one could argue that the thinkers in question here move, each in their
own way, and perhaps without knowing it, irreversibly beyond anything
that could be called properly dialectical. More precisely, one might argue that
what passes for dialectics in this book, especially a decolonized dialectics
that foregrounds the category of subontological difference and exteriority,
has crossed the crucial Hegelian threshold that divides difference (an internal relationship) from diversity (the indifferent difference of a purely external relation).16 Without the ties that bind opposing elements by necessity
to one another—without, in other words, the unified ground of totality to
grant meaning to oppositions—nothing remains but unrelated multiplicity.
Why then attempt to unite such a motley band of theoretical heretics
under the banner of dialectics in the first place? Is it not fairer and safer
to circumvent thorny philological and Marxological debates by simply opting out? While tempting in its simplicity, I believe that to evade dialectics
entirely would be a cop-out, for at least three reasons: two theoretical reasons that point, from inverse directions and at opposite extremes, toward
the danger of bad dialectics on the one hand and bad multiplicity on the
other. These two theoretical reasons then ground the potentially tooobvious practical argument for a dialectical approach that nevertheless, in
Ruptures
9
its simplicity, conceals its own theoretical rationale: that the thinkers in
question considered themselves to be doing the same.
First, to surrender the name dialectics would be to hand dialectical thinking over to its more conservative proponents, as a phenomenon oriented
toward internal closure or centered too stringently on the internal nature
of oppositions. If we hold too tightly to what binds the two sides to one
another in a predetermined logic, we foreclose on a radicalized dialectics by
succumbing to what Fredric Jameson describes as “the possibility that difference might vanish altogether in some premature identity.”17 This threat
should not be a surprise, since the question of unity constitutes a fundamental tension and perennial temptation for even the inaugurators of the
tradition. Whether it be Hegel’s own anxieties toward dialectical rupture
and desire to theorize systematic reunification, or Marx’s posing of a less
systematic but still reconciled logic and end of history, master dialecticians
past were not immune to those elements so scrutinized in the past century:
teleology, determinism, linearity, progressivism, and the lure of totality.
This is not and cannot be a book about Hegel or Marx however—about
those who draw them together or oppose them— for space limitations,
for the interminable debates this would provoke, and above all because
we must set such questions aside if we are ever going to get where we are
going. What can and must be said is that the powerful ambivalence both
Hegel and Marx display toward unity bespeaks radical kernels of possibility at the very least, kernels that the thinkers discussed in this book seize
upon, transform, and exploit in more unabashedly combative directions.18
This is not to suggest that there have been no previous efforts to decolonize the dialectical tradition, and much less to strip that tradition of its
more conservative residues.19 Suffice it to say, however, many attempts
to liberate the dialectical tradition from such fetters have ended up inadvertently reproducing elements of the same, with even the best examples
showing just how far epistemic decolonization still has to go.20
My approach, and that of the thinkers—not to mention the political
processes and movements discussed here—will be more directly trained
on the dual task of radically rethinking dialectics in a manner faithful to
the combative dialectical spirit and decolonizing dialectical thought in the
process, insisting all the way that this ostensibly dual task is in fact but a
single one. If radicalizing dialectics to the very point of incommensurability runs the risk of moving beyond dialectics entirely, it has the virtue of
bringing into the dialectical purview oppositions that are too often obscured. If radicalizing dialectics means attempting to strip away all tele10 Ruptures
ology, decolonizing dialectics underscores how the telos of Hegelian and
Marxian conceptions of history emerges from a particular location (Europe), and assumes forms of dialectical resolution specific to it (Sittlichkeit
through civil society for Hegel, the resolution of the industrial proletariatbourgeoisie class opposition for Marx).
If a radicalized dialectics resists the idea that the dialectic moves inexorably and deterministically according to its own internal oppositions, a
decolonized dialectics recognizes both the historical source of that motion
outside Europe in the colonies as well as the brutal reality that for colonial
subjects, history often seems to move backward rather than forward, if it
moves at all. If a radicalized dialectics questions the fixed linearity of dialectical movement and recognizes the subjective capacity to set relations
into motion and change course, a decolonized dialectics sets out from the
historical experience of those who have been instructed to either catch up
with Europe by completing the necessary “stages” or to await “objective
conditions” that are possible only under a full-fledged capitalism.
Although it is possible to radicalize dialectics without decolonizing, as
Sorel does, I argue that it is not possible to decolonize without radicalizing.
Any process of decolonization that shies away from incessant dialectical
tensions, the contingency of struggle, and the indeterminacy of the future
risks reiterating the history of actually existing decolonization that Fanon
unceremoniously dismissed as the “dead end” and “sterile formalism” of
bourgeois nationalist rule.21 To the extent that we refuse this straitjacketed view of a dialectical difference that refuses or subsumes diversity—
foregrounding instead division, rupture, and dynamic opposition—we will
always be confronted with a subversive and unpredictable remainder that,
as we move toward decolonization, gains a distinct valence in what Fanon
calls “nonbeing” and Dussel calls “exteriority,” that which lies beyond the
realm of division and which by appearing makes a more profound rupture
manifest. And to the extent that the turn toward this remainder pulls us
from internal to external difference, our dialectics will lose all the comforts of predictable motion or inevitable progress.
Second, if we do not put up a fight for the name dialectics, we risk abandoning the field of dynamic oppositions—especially those macro-oppositions
that cut across society and globe—to the many theories of multiplicity so
prevalent today, theories that would see us willfully neglect or deny the
broad swing of motion such oppositions often entail. In what follows, I resist this danger not only by reclaiming dialectics, but also—simultaneously
and from the opposite direction—by reclaiming Foucault’s conception of
Ruptures
11
counterdiscourse as itself dialectical, thereby robbing uncritical theories of
multiplicity of a caricatured Foucault reducible to the micropolitical. It was
against such bad multiplicities—and that of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in
particular—that Hegel sought to fold diversity immediately into dialectical opposition, and while mindful of this concern, I hope to instead slow
this folding, to sit with and inhabit the category of diversity and the external relation it poses as a key to decolonizing Hegel himself.
Third: it is between these two reasons—bad dialectics on the one hand
and bad multiplicity on the other—that we can then walk the practical
line set out by the thinkers considered here, not to mention an entire trajectory of decolonial organic intellectuals. In other words, this is a dialectical project in part because the thinkers involved took the dialectical
tradition—however critically understood—as a central point of reference.
These are thinkers who saw Hegel, Marx, or both as powerful and necessary interlocutors, and in this they were not alone: for more than a century,
for better or for worse, the dialectical tradition has served as a go-to
weapon in the struggle for not only class liberation but also—all ambiguities and tensions aside—for racial and national liberation.
These ambiguities and tensions are not to be set aside entirely, however, but are instead a central part of the story. An entire litany of radical
and decolonial thinkers—George Padmore, Richard Wright, and Aimé
Césaire, to name only a few—were even members of official communist
parties before breaking with those parties precisely amid sharp debates
over race and colonialism.22 These are thinkers who found in Hegel and
Marx values of autonomous selfhood and liberation, tools to diagnose
and critique global capitalism, methods that began—as they knew they
should—not from negotiation but from struggle, and weapons to sharpen
against the “slavery and social death” left in the wake of colonization.23
But these are also thinkers who often found Hegel and Marx unable,
and their political heirs unwilling, to grapple seriously with the legacy of
actual slavery. Once we add those such as Frederick Douglass, who as I
will argue in the conclusion puts forth a decolonized dialectics without
having read either, it becomes clear that to argue, as Timothy Brennan
does, that “the parentage of the postcolonial is, ultimately, a communist
one,” is misleading at best, and furthermore evades entirely the central
tension posed here.24 Rather than skirt the questions that this tension
raises on both sides—and losing in the process either the importance of
communism for decolonization or its failings, why so many were members
12 Ruptures
but also why they left—my goal here is to confront the tension head on as
one to be grappled with.
Which is another way of saying that we must walk in theory the same
fine line that decolonial militants have often walked in practice: neither
rejecting nor uncritically embracing the dialectical tradition, but instead
attempting to rescue a theory of dynamic oppositions from being recolonized by logics of unity or dispersed into meaningless multiplicity. These
are thinkers who, while stubborn in their insistence on the rupture of
the existing order, are simultaneously and for the same reason deeply hostile
to the recuperation of dialectics into unitary logics. As a result, the radicalized dialectical approach they produce, with its combative oppositions and
refusal to see divisions subsumed into the whole, is arguably more faithful
to the dialectical spirit than even some who gave the approach its name.
Viewed this way, the thinkers considered here, as a result of their liminal
position that straddles the very border of dialectical thought, might just
be the best defenders of any dialectics worth its salt.
Here again, Jameson is productive for his nuanced mapping of the terrain to be traversed between the uncritical unity of conservative dialectics
and the uncritical multiplicity of deconstructive temptations, between
which lay the terrain of a radicalized dialectics:
the dialectic moves jerkily from moment to moment like a slide show,
where deconstruction dizzily fast-forwards . . . both work to bring up
into the light the structural incoherences of the “idea” or conceptual
“positions” or interpretations which are their object of critique. But
where the dialectic pauses, waiting for the new “dialectical” solution to
freeze over in its turn and become an idea or an ideology to which the
dialectic can again be “applied” . . . deconstruction races forward . . .
devour[ing] its own tail, and thus itself in the process. One of the outcomes thus devoured and unraveled is of course the dialectic itself,
which paused too long, and became an ideology in its own right, yet
another object of deconstruction.25
It is in this generative space between the stalled hesitancy of a dialectic that
waits too long and the ravenous appetite of a deconstruction that, in the absence of sustenance, is content to feed on itself, that my project also moves.
In lieu of offering a preemptive definition of dialectics that might violate
the spirit of the term, I begin provisionally from Jameson’s own methodological insistence that “any opposition can be the starting point for a
Ruptures
13
dialectic in its own right,” allowing a proliferation of local dialectics and
dynamic oppositions, and I follow him in generally shunning the definite article denoting “the” dialectic.26 However, my approach is different
in two ways: first, I trail slightly closer to deconstruction in the degree
to which contingency, indeterminacy, and an open hostility to totality
imbue the multiple and local dialectics of the thinkers considered here.
Furthermore, I move toward a dialectics understood above all as a practice, or what C. L. R. James aspired to do in his Notes on Dialectics: “not
explanations of the dialectic but directly the dialectic itself.”27 The thinkers considered here are more organic intellectuals than world-historical
philosophers looking down with a bird’s-eye-view from above, thinkers
who do theory on the basis of actors pressing the dialectic forward themselves through collective solidarities and combat. If this sounds like a
strange way to speak of dialectics, this is precisely because the closer we
trail toward a conservative dialectics, the less often we hear of one acting
dialectically or engaging in dialectical struggle. In this caricatured view—
certainly more Hegel than Marx, and a conservative Hegel at that—the
dialectic (and here it is almost always the) is something that happens to us
and acts upon us, in which we are enmeshed whether we know it or not,
unconsciously doing the grand work of history.28
The thinkers considered here are doing something different, and to approach dialectics as practice helps to partially allay the dangerous flights
that have characterized some previous attempts to think dialectics beyond
its conservative forms: to take refuge in paradox or incommensurability
in which there is no motion but the (not inconsequential) whirring of the
philosopher’s mental gears. Actual struggles, ongoing and permanent,
can thereby recede into the background, or worse still, be unilaterally dismissed by master dialecticians. If dialectical thought is instead localized
and embedded in concrete material practice, however, to be a dialectician
gains a wholly new meaning: that of pressing subjectively forward in collective combat, embodying Lenin’s “leaps, leaps, leaps!” without any certainty whatsoever that a better world will be the inevitable result.29
Why Counterdiscourse?
As should be clear by now, we cannot decolonize dialectics solely by prying
open the cracks of immanent critique—although this is crucial, and the
thinkers that make up this volume embody such cracks each in their own
way. Rather, radicalizing dialectical oppositions to the very breaking point
at which internal verge on external differences, and opening such opposi14 Ruptures
tions toward the substantive exteriority of a decolonial critique, requires
that we step to the very limits of dialectics—or even beyond—before
casting our gaze back. If this involves stepping beyond the geographical
boundaries of traditional dialectics, so too with methodological boundaries,
and it is here that Foucault offers some useful tools. I turn and return to
Foucault more than simply to reclaim his theories for a radicalized dialectics, but also because he provides concrete cues for both the method and
content of this project. However, as will become clear, Foucault—like the
thinkers that constitute this book—is more liminal to than outside of the
scope of the dialectical, and while he would locate the incommensurable
oppositions he identifies as being beyond dialectics, I see these as instead
marking and opening its outer limits.
This claim might seem a scandalous affront to Foucault, the avowed
antidialectician, not to mention those who understand Foucault’s genealogical method as a purely critical project. But while tracing the surface
and measuring the mass of Foucault’s oeuvre certainly reveals more critique than positive construct, lying beneath and slightly to the side of
Foucault’s critical genealogies are subjugated counterdiscourses, counterhistories, and countermemories to be excavated and set into motion.30 To
bind counterdiscourse to genealogy—the form of discourse to the mode of
its recovery—is moreover but a single gesture, as the two are utterly inseparable from one another and from the subject matter of this study. Critique, for Foucault, aims “to dig” subjugated knowledges “out of the sand,”
but it is the very existence of these knowledges—grounded in “struggles
and the raw memory of fights”—that makes critique both possible and effective.31 This is more than mere excavation, and the fight is not limited to
memory: the goal is instead one of “reactivating” combative memories
toward “contemporary tactics,” “to set them free . . . to enable them to
oppose and strug gle.”32 The result of this reactivation of oppositional counterdiscourses and their setting into combative motion is, I argue, dialectical in both form and content. Genealogy, through the counterdiscourse it
frees, presses toward dialectical motion.33
With regard to content, counterdiscourses stand against the unitary
pretensions of what Foucault calls “science” (traditional dialectics included).
Genealogies are thus “antisciences” because they incite an “insurrection of knowledges” against the “centralizing power-effects” of scientific
discourse, which legitimizes some knowledges and disqualifies others, establishing the ground of what does and does not count.34 The problem
with Marxism, for Foucault—and indeed with dialectics tout court—is not
Ruptures
15
that it lacks scientific rigor, but that it aspires to be a science in the first
place (this is a sentiment that Sorel shared). Hence genealogy as method
is doubled in terms of the very content that renders it effective: what is
recovered is not just any historical discourse that has been occluded from
sight, but rather those discourses that pose a challenge to prevailing logics and practices of unity.35 Nowhere is this coincidence of method and
content clearer than in Foucault’s excavation of what is arguably the paradigmatic counterdiscourse: what he calls, revealingly and provocatively,
the “race war.”
Toward the end of the sixteenth century, according to Foucault, European states consolidated their monopoly on violence and “war was expelled
to the limits of the State,” to the border, exiled from society to interstate
relations.36 But a counterdiscourse to this milestone in sovereign unity
emerged almost immediately, according to which “a battlefront runs
through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this
battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other.”37 Such a “binary”
view has clear epistemological implications: if society is divided, then no
subject can be “universal, totalizing, or neutral,” and all knowledge is
“perspectival . . . interested in the totality only to the extent that it can
see it in one-sided terms, distort it and see it from its own point of view.”
“The truth is, in other words,” he writes, “a truth that can be deployed only
from its combat position.” The idea of the “race war” as absolute incommensurability stands against not only ruling discourse but all unitary discourse, “tears society apart and speaks of legitimate rights solely in order
to declare war on laws.”38
But the immediate danger that confronts all radically oppositional
discourses is that they “ will be recoded, recolonized by the unitary discourses.”39 The counterdiscourse of the race war was no exception, and as
a result, Foucault shows how this formerly “decentered” counterdiscourse
was eventually “recentered” to “become the discourse of power itself.”40
While one path this recentering took was the biological reification of race
in Nazism, less noted but equally insidious for Foucault was the dialectical recentering of the “race war”: “the dialectic codifies struggle, war, and
confrontations into a logic, or so-called logic, of contradiction . . . ensures
the historical constitution of a universal subject, a reconciled truth, and
a right in which all particularities have their ordained place. The Hegelian
dialectic and all those that come after it must . . . be understood as philosophy and right’s colonization . . . of a historico-political discourse that was
both a statement of fact, a proclamation, and a practice of social warfare.”41
16 Ruptures
In his attempt to reject all dialectics, however, Foucault provides potent
guidance for how best to rescue and reclaim a radicalized dialectical vision.
If the fundamental danger is that combative discourses will almost inevitably suffer reincorporation, recolonization, and recentering into governing
doctrines of unity, it is precisely this danger that we must resist. To do so
also obviously means to overcome Foucault’s own unambiguous hostility
to dialectics and the mistakenly sweeping generalization, “all those that
come after it must . . .” Such reverse totalization—a perennial difficulty of
poststructuralist approaches that slide too easily from critique to the insistence that nothing exists beyond the object of that critique—seems to
openly contradict Foucault’s own methodological sensibilities. But it also
comes on the heels of a long list of qualifiers—totalization, rationality,
irreversibility, universal subject, reconciled truth—to be added to a conspicuously singular term, the dialectic. What if there were to exist many
dialectics that do not carry these pernicious attributes of the dialectic and
that instead prioritize oppositional combat over unity?
Despite being frequently associated with the micropolitical, itself a much
abused term, Foucault’s own critiques of logics of unity go hand in hand
with an arguably dialectical account of the strategic (macro)unification
of the tactical (micro)moments of power. As he puts it, “No ‘local center,’
no ‘pattern of transformation’ could function if . . . it did not eventually
enter into an over-all strategy,” and as a result, power relations “form a
general line of force that traverses the local oppositions and links them together.”42 While certainly incompatible with what Foucault most loathes
about dialectics, such a view is nevertheless compatible with the radicalized and decolonized dialectics that emerge from the thinkers considered
in this book, for whom the subjective moment of combative, one-sided
rupture (Foucault’s “social warfare”) is jealously maintained at the expense
of any final resolution, any determinist progression, in short, any foreseeable horizon for reconciled unity. Again, it is only with the help of Foucault and others who similarly walk the fine line between dialectics and its
opposites—and here I count Sorel, Fanon, and Dussel—that we can approach the task of truly radicalizing and decolonizing dialectical thought.43
In a crucially different time and place, Foucault would grant dialectics
the same indeterminate duality he ascribes to other discourses, the ability to serve different and even opposing purposes. This time the dialectics were Marxian and the place was Tunisia, where “everyone was drawn
into Marxism with radical violence and intensity and with a staggeringly
power ful thrust.” “For those young people,” he continues, “Marxism did
Ruptures
17
not represent merely a way of analyzing reality; it was also a kind of moral
force . . . And that led me to believe that without a doubt the role of political
ideology, or of a political perception of the world, was indispensable to
the goal of setting off the struggle.”44 Violence, ideology, myth, and subjectively “setting off the struggle”—all explicitly echo elements of the radicalized dialectical counterdiscourse that I sketch in this book. Far from the
French Communist Party, whose influence had overdetermined Foucault’s
entire understanding of dialectics, the “scientific character” of Marxism—
its claim to a unified truth—receded into the background as “an entirely
secondary question.”45 In other words, the primary practical function
of Tunisian Marxism was the opposite of what had so alienated Foucault
from its European counterparts.46
It was no coincidence that this transformation occurred in the Tunisian
context, beyond the “motionless movement” of Europe, where for Fanon
“dialectics has gradually turned into a logic of equilibrium.”47 And nor is
it any mistake that Foucault named his paradigmatically oppositional discourse the “race war” and described its eventual recentering as a process of
“recolonization.” Even if this equation of recolonization with recentering
gains a concrete literalness in the hands of decolonial thinkers, Foucault
is already pointing us in the right direction. Decolonization for Fanon
as for Dussel entails and indeed requires a fundamental break with the
paradigm of totality, a deferral of dialectical closure, and the rejection of
a more straightforwardly colonial variant of Foucault’s “science,” one that
disqualifies not only knowledges (epistemological disqualification) but
those very beings deemed innately incapable of producing such knowledges (ontological disqualification).
Black Anti-Jacobins?
A final note before I begin. Latent in all that has been said above is an ambitious comparative project, one that is both broader and narrower than
what currently goes by the name “comparative political theory.” If we strip
away the thinkers, contexts, and methods, we are left with four identities that are too often considered to be utterly irreconcilable: class, race,
nation, and people. But this irreconcilability is grounded in naturalized
unities, some of which are thankfully receding into the past: structural
notions of class, biological conceptions of race, the nation as a priori, or
the people as a modern expression of undivided sovereignty. Built into
the structure of this book, then, is an insistence on the equivalence and
coevalness of different forms of political identity, and a rejection of the all18 Ruptures
too-frequent contempt for so-called identity politics. The idea that class
is “real” whereas race is simply a backward idea to be abandoned, or that
nations are “imagined communities” and nothing more, is bound up with
the idea of reason in history that is so central to the same conservative
dialectics we hope to bury.48 Just as class identity is fully capable of losing its political meaning if severed from class condition, so too does race
exist in a dialectic of identifying and being identified that is itself a form of
class-ification.49
This is not to suggest that no communities are imagined, but instead that
all communities are, that imagination is a part of all political identities—
class very much included—and this imagination is never divorced from
material practices. It is to release those political identities from the straitjacket of teleological determinism, to allow and indeed demand that they
stand forth and function, assuming their proper position at the heart of
any dialectics worthy of the name. Inversely, if conservative dialectics is
complicit with a hierarchy of identities, to radicalize and decolonize dialectics in a way that foregrounds the active subjectivity of their constituents is to open up a space to consider their functions comparatively, a
space for the contingency of multiple overlapping and clashing identities
that is better suited to what Aníbal Quijano calls the “historical-structural
heterogeneity” of ostensibly postcolonial societies.50
If there is a model for the sort of comparative political theorizing I hope to
undertake here, for the joint analysis of race, class, nation, and people—not
to mention a radicalized dialectic of decolonization in which contingency
and unpredictability stand firmly in the foreground—it is C. L. R. James’s
The Black Jacobins. While James’s concrete task was to recover the memory
of the most systematically expunged and “disavowed” event in “modern”
history, the Haitian Revolution, the implications of his work far exceed
this already monumental task.51 The radical kernel of The Black Jacobins
lies in the fact that it was not merely a history of the world’s first successful slave revolution, but also of that decisive event with which it did
not run parallel—a metaphor loaded with misleading equidistance—but
was instead fully intertwined and, finally, entangled: the French Revolution. One revolution systematically erased, the other upheld on a pedestal
as the “bourgeois” revolution—tipping point in a world-historic dialectical progression—the colonial veil separating the two cannot survive the
piercing blow of James’s analysis, and with it goes much else.
James’s insistence on the coevalness of these intertwined revolutionary
processes sets into motion an uncontrollable avalanche whose theoretical
Ruptures
19
devastation arguably exceeds the author’s own intentions, leading to the
collapse of strict class oppositions, and with them the notion of historical
stages and inevitable progress. If the pedestal cracks under James’s blunt
insistence that so prefeudal a phenomenon as slavery constituted “the
economic basis of the [bourgeois] French Revolution,” feet of clay collapse
as the narrative unfolds.52 Rebellions on the old continent fueled freedom
dreams on the new, and the unprecedented—and unthinkable—resistance
of heretofore nonhumans propelled French revolutionaries to ever more
radical lengths. Were it not for Thermidor, Toussaint would never have been
thrust toward independence; were it not for France’s utter reliance on the
colonial economy, Bonaparte would never have given the final and decisive
push.
More subversively still, James—a Marxist—transposes the political
identities Marxists had reserved for Europe onto the colonial world and vice
versa: the French masses were analogous to the Black slaves, the French
aristocracy to colonial planters, and the French bourgeoisie to the privileged
mulattoes of San Domingo. In sum: “Had the monarchists been white, the
bourgeoisie brown, and the masses of France black, the French Revolution
would have gone down in history as a race war.”53 That James uses the same
term that Foucault would deploy to describe the binary division of European societies is as productive in its suggestive similarity as in the gap it reflects. The slaves were the same as the proletariat, these “half-savage slaves
of San Domingo were showing themselves subject to the same historical
laws as the advanced workers of revolutionary Paris.”54 But this sameness
unleashed a radical difference according to which Black slaves even prefigured the European proletariat itself: “working and living together in gangs
of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories . . . they were closer to a modern
proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time.”55
To subject slaves to these “same historical laws,” however, was to open
a Pandora’s box that explodes their status as laws: without sharp class
oppositions—as Sorel also insisted—there can be no historical determinism, and it was instead the revolutionary self-activity of the masses in
Paris and Port-au-Prince that drove the revolutions forward, and fear of
the same that would prompt their retreat.56 Class is race, and European
civilization is little more than barbaric brutality.57 Amid the swirling contingency of transatlantic combat, no single dialectic can claim either centrality or inevitability. The pretense of automatic forward motion—itself
tightly bound up with Eurocentric history—disintegrates into James’s fa-
20 Ruptures
mously tragic view of history: “Sad though it may be, that is the way that
humanity progresses. The anniversary orators and the historians supply
the prose-poetry and the flowers.”58 But tragedy is only tragic if we know
what is coming, and the collapse of dialectical determinism is in itself a
liberation in the knowledge that, in Fanon’s words, “the war goes on . . .”59
I hope, however immodestly, to walk in the footsteps of this radically
comparative theoretical project, drawing together multiple dialectics
whose central identities—class, race, nation, and people—are neither distinguished categorically from nor reduced to one another. But to embrace
Black Jacobins as a methodological model for thinking a decolonized dialectics raises a peculiar question: How to square the bold assertion contained
in James’s title with the radicalized dialectical counterdiscourse running
through Sorel, Fanon, and Dussel that, I argue, can be understood on some
level as “anti-Jacobin”? We are getting ahead of ourselves, however. In the
wildly swirling dialectical eddies of this “tragic” history; the dynamic interaction between masses and leadership; and the fraught role of Black
identity, tradition, and positivity, James’s initially celebratory view of
Jacobinism gives way to something far more ambivalent and indeterminate that is characteristic of a decolonized dialectics.
Where Sorel presses the dialectic of the European class struggle to its
very breaking point, insisting that between worker and capitalist the only
relation is one of war, Fanon and Dussel will theorize more fully the edges
of the dialectic where its internal oppositions give way to not meaningless
difference, but new grounds for decolonization. And if Fanon insisted that
“decolonization is truly the creation of new people” through a process in
which “the colonized ‘thing’ becomes a person through the very process of
self-liberation,” then Venezuela today stands as confirmation of both the
radical potential of this dialectics and its lack of guarantees.60
Hannah Arendt, in her critical zeal, tacitly attests to C. L. R. James’s
ambitiously expansive homology between metropole and colony, arguing
that both the slaves and the unfortunate malheureux of the French Revolution “carried with them necessity, to which they had been subject as
long as memory reaches, together with the violence that had always been
used to overcome necessity. Both together, necessity and violence, made
them appear irresistible—la puissance de la terre.”61 But to this puissance
celebrated by Saint-Just, I hope to reply with a different constellation, one
that spans not the distance separating the Bastille and Saint-Domingue—
as in the Jamesian version—but rather between the puissance of the
Ruptures
21
twentieth-century French working class and the process, still unfinished, of
revolutionary decolonization. But to do so requires that we instead shift
toward that subterranean source of decolonial dialectical motion that lay
not above la terre but below it, in those condemned nonbeings known as
the damnés.
22 Ruptures
NOTES
Ruptures
1. For Stephen B. Smith, this concern unified Hegel’s theoretical production
while justifying philosophy as a project of reconciliation. Hegel’s Critique of
Liberalism: Rights in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 17.
2. This is not to reduce Hegel to his disciples on the Right, and while Fukuyama
is at pains to defend Hegel from the Marxian critique of civil society, he
leans heavily on Alexandre Kojève’s “end of history” argument to do so.
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 2006 [1992]), 60–65. On Fukuyama as a characteristically
Right Hegelian, see Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit (London: Verso, 2010), 5. To be clear, Hegel is far more
concerned with the dangerous tendencies of the market than his conservative heirs, but civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) remains nevertheless
a space of mediation, its inevitable imperfection resolved through the
“police” function of the state. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of
Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991
[1820]), “Section 2: Civil Society,” a subset of which is “The Police.” On the
tendency of civil society to generate poverty, see §§ 241–45; on its tendency
to require colonial expansion, see §§ 246–48. For a nuanced discussion, see
Reinhart Klemens Maurer, “Hegel and the End of History,” in Hegel Myths
and Legends, ed. J. Stewart (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996),
199–222.
3. Where Fukuyama would consider such regime changes mere “events,” hardly
noticeable bumps on the ever-smoother road of “universal civil society,”
civil society’s double-role as both measure and ambitious means for actively
securing the end of history should be enough to reveal the cynical circularity
of his system. This complicity of civil society with power is most evident
in the discourses and practices of human rights, which Wendy Brown cautions “are not simply rules and defenses against power, but can themselves
be tactics and vehicles of governance and domination.” “ ‘The Most We Can
Hope For . . .’: Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism,” South Atlantic
Quarterly 103, nos. 2/3 (2004): 459. Slavoj Žižek characterizes human rights
discourse as “a false ideological universality, which masks and legitimizes a
concrete politics of Western imperialism, military interventions and neocolonialism.” “Against Human Rights,” New Left Review 34 (2005): 128–29.
See also Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans.
P. Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 8–10; and José-Manuel Barreto, ed.,
Human Rights from a Third World Perspective: Critique, History, and International Law (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2013).
4. On Hegel, see Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009),
as well as Slavoj Žižek’s gargantuan Less Than Nothing (London: Verso, 2012).
On the renewal of communism, see especially Alain Badiou, The Communist
Hypothesis (London: Verso, 2010); Bruno Bosteels, The Actuality of Communism
(London: Verso, 2011); and Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso,
2012). On contemporary forms of struggle, see Badiou’s more recent The
Rebirth of History (London: Verso: 2012). On dialectics more broadly, see, e.g.,
Andrew Douglas, In the Spirit of Critique: Thinking Politically in the Dialectical
Tradition (Albany: suny Press, 2013); John Grant, Dialectics and Contemporary
Politics: Critique and Transformation from Hegel through Post-Marxism (London:
Routledge, 2013); and Brian Lovato, Democracy, Dialectics, and Difference: Hegel,
Marx, and 21st Century Social Movements (London: Routledge, 2015). Elements
of what follows have appeared in George Ciccariello-Maher, “ ‘So Much the
Worse for the Whites’: Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of French
and Francophone Philosophy 22, no. 1 (2014): 19–39.
5. Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo, “Universal History Disavowed: On Critical Theory
and Postcolonialism,” Postcolonial Studies 11, no. 4 (2008): 452.
6. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. J. Barker (London, Verso, 2005), 97; Badiou, Ethics, 27.
7. Slavoj Žižek, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,’ ” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 4 (summer
1998): 988–1009. For a critique of the latter, see Nelson Maldonado-Torres,
“Decolonization and the New Identitarian Logics After September 11,” Radical Philosophy Review 8, no. 1 (2005): 35–67. Even more troubling has been
Žižek’s recent call to embrace Western culture and “our freedoms” in the
face of an influx of refugees—a partial indication of the dead-end into which
such an uncritical universalism leads. “In the Wake of Paris Attacks the Left
Must Embrace Its Radical Western Roots,” In These Times (November 16,
2015), http://inthesetimes.com/article/18605/breaking-the-taboos-in-the
-wake-of-paris-attacks-the-left-must-embrace-its. Glen Coulthard similarly
maps the tensions between decolonization and the “left-materialist” critique
172 notes to Ruptures
of so-called identity politics in his excellent Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2014).
8. Glenn Greenwald, “Two Short Paragraphs That Summarize the U.S. Approach to Human Rights Advocacy,” Intercept (September 13, 2015),
https://theintercept.com/2015/09/13/two-short-paragraphs-summarize-us
-approach-human-rights-advocacy/.
9. Glen Ford, “Obama’s Siren Song,” Counterpunch (June 14, 2007), http://www
.counterpunch.org/2007/06/14/obama-s-siren-song/.
10. The debate surrounding this division was nasty and destructive in many
ways. While there might seem to be overlap between the proposal to “decolonize” the Occupy Movement and my objectives in this book, in practice
it raised troubling questions about the relationship between nonprofits and
the state, race-baiting opportunism, and the role (and indeed category) of
white “allies.” See the original statement, “Communiqué from Decolonize
Oakland” (March 18, 2012), http://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2012
/03/18/communique-from-decolonize-oakland/. In retrospect, this marked
a turning point, prompting a reverse pendulum swing toward a renewed
critique of “identity politics” within post-Occupy political formations that
both responds to real conditions while arguably throwing out the decolonial baby with the bathwater in a manner akin to Žižek and Badiou. For the
best statement on race in the Occupy Movement, and for a more dialectical
understanding of the 99 percent, see Joel Olson, “Whiteness and the 99%”
(October 20, 2011), reprinted in We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy From Occupation to Liberation, ed. K. Khatib, M. Killjoy, and M. McGuire
(Oakland: ak Press, 2012), 46–51.
11. Due to the historical weight of the dialectical tradition, the particular trajectory of thinkers I trace in this book, and my own theoretical limitations, this
is not a book that deals substantially with gender identity as a dialectical
category alongside class, race, nation, and people. However, some—notably
Sina Kramer—have already theorized gender at the border of dialectics,
where internal and external relations meet. “Derrida’s ‘Antigonanette’: On
the Quasi-Transcendental,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 52, no. 4 (December 2014), 521–51. However, posing gender as an external incommensurability also runs up against the classed and raced complicity across genders, a
challenge raised in particular by the decolonial and Black feminisms I return
to in the conclusion. See, in particular, Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,
Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (summer
1987): 65–81.
12. Cristina Beltrán, The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of
Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). While I take Beltrán’s
warning seriously, my approach will tread closer to a radicalized dialectics
than the sort of rhizomatics associated with Gilles Deleuze.
notes to Ruptures
173
13. See M. W. Jackson, “Hegel: The Real and the Rational,” in Hegel Myths and
Legends, 19–25.
14. It should be clear here that I mean teleology in the strong and literal sense:
not the mere existence of a horizon but the idea that the present anticipates
and is structured according to that horizon.
15. Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to
Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Jay’s book expands
upon and systematizes his previous fivefold typology of totality discussed in
Martin Jay, “The Concept of Totality in Lukács and Adorno,” in Varieties of
Marxism, ed. S. Avineri (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 147–74.
16. The reference point here is Hegel’s very rapid transition through diversity in
the Logic, greater and lesser. As to the first, in which diversity (Verschiedenheit) appears as the “indifference of difference” and an immediate bridge
to opposition, see The Science of Logic, trans. G. di Giovanno (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010), 362–67 (II.268–272). For the latter, see
The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris
(Cambridge: Hackett, 1991), 182–93 (§117). For Jameson, the question is
whether relations are “so intimate as to fold it back into unity, [or] so distant
or external as to break apart into two distinct zones or fields, two different
objects.” To accommodate this “ambiguous no man’s land between . . .
internal and external relations, or unity and incommensurability,” he insists
on stretching the term contradiction (Valences of the Dialectic, 25, 42–43). Sina
Kramer emphasizes Hegel’s failed attempt to exclude diversity from the
dialectic—an exclusion that founds the distinction between the speculative
and the empirical, but which by failing to be fully banished contaminates the
former with the latter. Sina Kramer, Excluded Within: The (Un)Intelligibility of
Radical Political Actors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
17. Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 25.
18. Jameson, for example, divides Hegel’s oeuvre, defending the radicalism of Phenomenology. Some, like Timothy Brennan, argue that Philosophy of Right is actually Hegel’s most radical text for its concreteness and its political imperative
to transform the law. Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). Many Marxists, following Lenin’s Conspectus, argue that Hegel’s Logic is his radical work par excellence. Still more
identify ambivalences running throughout Hegel’s work, for example what
Patchen Markell characterizes as the tension between a “diagnostic voice” that
is “most clearly audible” in the Phenomenology, one geared toward constantly
rooting out contradiction, and the “voice of the system,” a voice of reconciliation, “the voice that promises us that at the end of this journey there lies the
prospect of a homecoming, of finally arriving at a state in which contradiction, division, suffering, and other manifestations of negativity have been not
necessarily eliminated, but at least redeemed as moments of an intelligible,
internally articulated, encompassing whole.” Bound By Recognition (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 92–93.
174 notes to Ruptures
For a truly stunning recent example that seeks to reclaim despair as
a revolutionary and “dialectical passion”—with a specific focus on the
Phenomenology—see Robyn Marasco, The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory
After Hegel (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 5. For Marasco,
“the Phenomenology is best read not as a roadmap to reconciliation . . . but
as a philosophical staging of despair and its persistence” (29). Despair, “a
condition that survives the ruins of the [Hegelian] system,” is “the name for
that undoing that the dialectic endlessly initiates” (2, 6). The dialectic she
unfolds, which holds out “no rational hope that a brighter future will repay
patient struggle in the present,” shares much with my project, for reasons
that might be easily guessed (1). And while not a strictly decolonial vision,
Marasco’s embrace of “forms of hope that survive against all hope” is peculiarly suited to (post)colonial conditions (10).
On Marx, it is worth simply rehearsing the historical debates between
those who emphasize the early and late and who centered the notion of the
epistemological rupture, but also those breaks undertaken by Marx himself
that are central to the discussion at hand, namely, his later interrogation of
the linear stageism he had previously associated with historical materialism. In later writings and letters to Vera Zasulich, for example, Marx began
to consider the possibility of a noncapitalist transition to communism, and
these writings would provide crucial leverage for decolonial Marxists. See
Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and NonWestern Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
19. The lineage that runs through Western Marxism and into the early Frankfurt School and its task of thinking a “negative dialectics” speaks directly to
the latter, as do recent efforts to reconsider Hegelian and Marxist thought.
Other promising tendencies, notably thinkers such as Antonio Negri and
some of the tradition of Italian Autonomia, posed sharp challenges to traditional dialectics before veering sharply off, under the influence of Deleuzian
theories of immanence, into professedly nondialectical territory. A recent
speech by Negri is nevertheless surprisingly ambivalent on the question of
dialectics, and certainly not as hostile as one might expect. Antonio Negri,
“Some Thoughts on the Use of Dialectics,” trans. A. Bove (June 2009),
http://antonionegriinenglish.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/some-thoughts-on
-the-use-of-dialectics/.
20. Thus the recent attempt by Susan Buck-Morss to shed the “anticipation of
unity” in Hegelian thought by drawing Hegel into open conversation with
the unspoken inspiration of the Haitian Revolution is dashed on the stubborn rocks of undialectical Eurocentrism. Not only does Buck-Morss fall
directly into this “anticipation of unity” by rejecting divisive political identities outright—race and nation in particular—in favor of the immediate
and unconditional assertion of universality as a fact, but the parameters of
her universal remain conspicuously Eurocentric as well. Susan Buck-Morss,
Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
notes to Ruptures
175
Press, 2009), x, 149–51. I make this argument more fully in “ ‘So Much the
Worse for the Whites.’ ”
Similarly limited approaches can be found in Brennan’s Borrowed Light,
which seeks to ground decolonial thought in Europe itself, and in Bruce
Baum’s recent article “Decolonizing Critical Theory,” which, notwithstanding
the grand claims of the title, provides in reality a very limited and almost
wholly immanent critique of the Frankfurt School. Constellations 22, no. 3
(2015): 420–34.
21. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. R. Philcox (New York: Grove
Press, 2004 [1961]), 144, translation modified; Œuvres (Paris: La Découverte,
2011), 585.
22. On these ambiguities, see Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the
Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000
[1983]), 183–84.
23. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
24. Brennan, Borrowed Light, 99.
25. Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 26–27.
26. Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 19.
27. Cited in Raya Dunayevskaya, “On C. L. R. James’ Notes on Dialectics,” News
and Letters (1997 [1972]): 4.
28. Such a view clearly conflicts with Robert Pippin’s more stripped-down
reading of Hegel as a practical philosopher concerned with the concrete, for
whom dialectics is above all diagnostic and even heuristic. Hegel’s Practical
Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See also Brennan, Borrowed Light, for a similar reading of
Hegel’s orientation toward the concrete. Even more than Hegel, of course,
Marx threw himself subjectively into the condensation of identities at the
same time that he analyzed the play of those identities from above and
inserted them into a transhistorical dialectical vision—raising the question
of where the center of gravity in the analysis falls, a situation not improved
by the incorporation of Marx into the academy.
29. I hope it is clear, here and elsewhere, that simply eschewing a strictly
economic language or displacing the centrality of class does not in any way
minimize the materiality of dialectics. I take a cue here from the “insurgent”
dialectics suggested by Iris Marion Young in Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). Young similarly puts
poststructural insights to powerfully material use by insisting that, “reducing differences to unity means bringing them under a universal category,
which requires expelling those aspects of the different things that do not fit
into the category.” “Difference thus becomes,” she writes, “a hierarchical opposition between what lies inside and what lies outside the category, valuing
more what lies inside than what lies outside” (102).
176 notes to Ruptures
30. Beneath the critique of medical-psychological containment there lies the
counterdiscourse of “madness”; to the critique of carceral containment,
the counterdiscourse of “prisoners” (this being, in fact, the context for one
of Foucault’s first uses of the term counterdiscourse). See Michel Foucault,
History of Madness, trans. J. Murphy and J. Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006
[1961]); Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New
York: Vintage, 1979 [1975]). For the reference to the “counterdiscourse of
prisoners,” see “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel
Foucault and Gilles Deleuze” (1972), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice:
Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977),
209.
31. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France,
1975–1976, trans. D. Macey (New York: Picador, 2003 [1997]), 7–8. Despite the
informal nature of the lectures, they effectively sharpen themes underlying
Foucault’s work as a whole. We can read this productively as self-criticism
of his own lopsided emphasis on the negative (after all, how many pages are
devoted to counterdiscourse in History of Madness or Discipline and Punish?).
Anna Laura Stoler recognized early on the importance of this clarification
of genealogy in the 1975–76 lectures; see Race and the Education of Desire:
Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1995), 60–65. For a critique of those who see Foucault’s project as foreclosing on the very possibility of counterdiscourse, see
Mario Moussa and Ron Scapp, “The Practical Theorizing of Michel Foucault:
Politics and Counterdiscourse,” Cultural Critique 33 (spring 1996), 87–112. For
Foucault’s own reconceptualization of the concept of critique, see Michel
Foucault, “What Is Critique?,” trans. L. Hochroth, in The Politics of Truth,
ed. S. Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997).
32. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 8, 10, my emphasis.
33. This is suggested as well by Richard Terdiman, who speaks of a “dialectic of
discursive struggle,” Discourse/Counterdiscourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1985), 68–69. See also Grant, Dialectics and Contemporary Politics.
34. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 9.
35. Conversely, this explains why some discourses are subjugated while others
are not, as the task is to “disinter something that has been hidden,” but not
only hidden: “carefully, deliberately, and wickedly misrepresented.” Foucault,
“Society Must Be Defended,” 72.
36. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 49.
37. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 51.
38. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 52, my emphasis; 73.
39. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 11. This subject is discussed as well by
Moussa and Scapp, who speak of the “insidious” way that “counterdiscourses
almost inevitably become discourses.” Moussa and Scapp, “The Practical
Theorizing of Michel Foucault,” 92, 106.
notes to Ruptures
177
40. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 49, 61.
41. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 58, my emphasis.
42. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978 [1976]), 99, 94.
43. Others have similarly turned Foucault’s insights, especially those delineated in the lectures, toward the analysis of race. For a pioneering work in
this vein, see Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire. For a powerful use of
Foucault’s lectures on abnormality to understand race in the U.S. context,
see Ladelle McWhorter, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). For an account that
melds Foucault with Martin Heidegger to understand racializing dynamics,
see Falguni Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of Race (Albany: suny Press,
2009). See also Eduardo Mendieta, “ ‘To Make Live and Let Die’: Foucault on
Racism,” published in Spanish in Tabula Rasa 6 (2007), 138–52, and available
in English at http://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/philosophy/people
/faculty_pages/docs/foucault.pdf.
44. Marxism did not relinquish its dangerous function as a “means of deception,” however. Michel Foucault, Remarks on Marx, trans. R. J. Goldstein
and J. Cascaito (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991 [1978/1981]), 134, 137.
45. Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 137.
46. In an interview from 1978, Foucault admits to never having explicitly
embraced Marxism, but not because he considers his work anti-Marxist.
Rather, he considers Marxism “so complex, so tangled . . . made up of so
many successive historical layers” and political interests that the question
of connecting to it on a systematic level seems impossible, or at least boring.
When it comes to Marx himself, however, Foucault is clear: “I situate my
work in the lineage of the second book of Capital,” in other words, not the
genesis of Capital, but “the genealogy of capitalism.” To openly cite Marx,
he worried, would be to shoulder unnecessary baggage in France, and so he
opted for “secret citations of Marx, that the Marxists themselves are not
able to recognize.” Michel Foucault, Colin Gordon, and Paul Patton, “Interview: Considerations on Marxism, Phenomenology and Power. Interview
With Michel Foucault; Recorded on April 3rd, 1978,” Foucault Studies 14
(September 2012): 100–101. I am grateful to Andrew Dilts for bringing this
passage to my attention. For a coherent analysis of the Foucauldian project
that emphasizes the relevance of Immanuel Kant for Foucault’s “critical
inquiry into the present” in a way that helps to break down the opposition
between genealogy and counterdiscourse, see Colin Koopman, Genealogy
as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2013), 12.
47. Fanon, Wretched, 237, translation modified; Œuvres, 675.
48. This phrase, often cited in passing from Benedict Anderson, often serves to
conceal the materiality he granted the idea. Imagined Communities (London:
Verso, 1982).
178 notes to Ruptures
49. In Fanon’s words, the relationship between being overdetermined from
within and from without. See also Aníbal Quijano, “The Coloniality of Power
and Social Classification,” trans. G. Ciccariello-Maher, published in Spanish
in Journal of World-Systems Research 6, no. 2 (2000): 342–86. See also Robert
Gooding-Williams’s joining of the “first person” and “third person” aspects
of racial overdetermination, in “Race, Multiculturalism and Democracy,”
Constellations 5, no. 1 (1998): 18–41.
50. Quijano, “The Coloniality of Power and Social Classification.”
51. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Overture and the San Domingo
Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989 [1938]). On the disavowal of the Haitian
Revolution, see Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of
Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
52. James, Black Jacobins, 47. Alongside the decisive self-activity of the slaves,
their economic centrality is the most important takeaway from that other
towering example published almost at the same time: W. E. B. Du Bois, Black
Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998 [1935]).
53. James, Black Jacobins, 128.
54. James, Black Jacobins, 243, my emphasis.
55. James, Black Jacobins, 85–86, my emphasis.
56. Rather than a heroically creative class, the bourgeoisie—like the
mulattoes—was a politically unstable “intermediate” class with “an immense respect for royal blood” and a concomitant fear of the masses. James,
Black Jacobins, 207, 230, 71.
57. James, Black Jacobins, 7, 88, 212. This latter point would be made best by fellow communist and Fanon mentor Aimé Césaire in his Discourse on Colonialism, trans. J. Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review, 2000 [1956]).
58. James, Black Jacobins, 63. David Scott has argued that the revised 1963 edition of The Black Jacobins showed a marked shift from a romantic to a tragic
emplotment, but he overlooks how this tragic perspective—as the quote
indicates—is present from the very outset. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2004).
59. Fanon, Wretched, repeated on 90, 91, 181; Œuvres, 534 [la guerre dure], 625
[la guerre continue], the latter having previously appeared in A Dying Colonialism, trans. H. Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1965 [1959]), 27; Œuvres,
265 . For an analysis that turns to this phrase to exemplify a dialectic that
“resists deliverance at every turn,” see Marasco, The Highway of Despair,
151. Or, to borrow Alberto Toscano’s recent description of Franco Fortini, a
“communism without guarantees.” Alberto Toscano, “Communism Without
Guarantees: On Franco Fortini,” Salvage (September 18, 2015), http://salvage
.zone/in-print/communism-without-guarantees-on-franco-fortini/. For Toscano’s call to embrace tragedy, see “Politics in a Tragic Key,” Radical Philosophy 180 (July/August 2013): 25–34. For a reading of tragedy through Fanon
and James, see Lewis R. Gordon, “Fanon’s Tragic Revolutionary Violence,”
notes to Ruptures
179
in Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. L. Gordon, T. Sharpley-Whiting, and R. White
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
60. Fanon, Wretched, 2, translation modified; Œuvres, 452.
61. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1990 [1963]), 114.
Chapter 1: Jumpstarting the Class Strug gle
1. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), 111; Réflexions sur la violence (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1910
[1908]), 159.
2. Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method (Champaign:
University of Illinois, 2003), 59.
3. Sorel, Reflections, 112n3; Réflexions, 159n1.
4. Georges Sorel, “Necessity and Fatalism in Marxism,” in From Georges Sorel,
ed. J. L. Stanley (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1987), 115 (hereafter
fgs).
5. Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution and Other Writings (Mineola, NY:
Dover, 2006).
6. Sorel, “Necessity and Fatalism in Marxism,” 115.
7. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations
(New York: Schocken, 1968), 257.
8. Neil McInnes, “Georges Sorel on the Trial of Socrates,” Politics: Australian
Journal of Political Science 10, no. 1 (May 1975): 40.
9. Georges Sorel, Le Procès de Socrate: Examen critique des thèses socratiques
(Paris: Alcan, 1889), 171.
10. Enthusiasm was historically considered the “nobler cousin” of fanaticism.
Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010),
xxi. Enthusiasm in both love and war would remain central for Sorel, who
decades later wrote that “love, by the enthusiasm it begets, can produce that
sublimity without which there would be no effective morality” (Reflections,
236; Réflexions, 342). In the martial realm, he projected the division inaugurated by Socrates forward onto the degeneration of military virtue under
Napoleon: “The best officers of that time fully realized that their talent consisted in furnishing their troops with the material means of expressing their
enthusiasm [élan],” and by their own (egalitarian) example were “merely the
first combatants, like true Homeric kings” (241, 350–51). But by this point,
military examples were merely metaphors for the class struggle: “The same
spirit is found in the working-class groups who are enthusiastic [passionnés]
about the general strike” (242, 352).
11. Citing Xenophon’s Symposium (VIII.9), Sorel accuses Socrates of elevating
heavenly love (Aphroditê Ourania) at the expense of a more common or
vulgar “pandemic” love available to any member of the demos (Aphroditê Pandêmos) (Le Procès, 87), adding that “it is not with his ignorant wife that the
Athenian [man] could conclude this union of souls, so vaunted by the phi180 notes to Ruptures